... is that there's any future for New Orleans beyond the next storm impact.

No one wants to say what's known. It's a sinking city with constantly eroding coastal protection that can't be renewed without hundreds of billions spent on reengineering the Mississippi to restore siltification of the delta. Period.

The cowards in government will continue to mislead the public with their hollow words but the reality of the truth is in their inaction.

New Orleans is a doomed city with no political will to save her.

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I'm such a political junkie. Sometimes I'm ashamed to even have thoughts like this.

Would it be the final nail in the Republican's coffin if hurricane Gustav swamps the city for the second time on Dumbya's watch? It is a very real possibility...

Good luck, NOLA. May the storms spare you. To watch all the suffering once again would be extremely hard to take.

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This is very powerful. As a New Orleans native and former resident, I appreciate this article.

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i don't think so...

And, yes, I DO take it personally

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As I read the article I kept thinking to myself, why is this painful event hanging around... and why are so many 'Merkins so willing to ignore the reality of New Orleans' ordeal and experience?

Whenever that kind of thing happens in life, it's usually because there's a lesson to be learned. And there is both a lesson and a warning in NOLA and Katrina.

The lesson is ecological law is non-negotiable and no matter the technofix, Nature will have Nature's way. Humans have been on the planet long enough to know this lesson. If they don't, they don't survive. Period. Barry Commoner observed and documented five core laws of ecology that have been and continue to be proven by human experience. If you overshoot them or try to step outside those boundaries, you will get spanked. Any technofix to help you overshoot or exceed a place's ecological boundaries will require both materials and financial resources. If those "props" are vulnerable to politics and circumstance, your technofixes will fail. The author's list in the article spells out how NOLA's technofixes failed due to the related props' vulnerabilities.

The warning Katrina and NOLA delivers the rest of us is simple: What can naturally happen in one place will happen in another. NOLA was perhaps the most vulnerable ecologically, built in a depression in the middle of the largest (or second largest) river delta on the continent. To stay there she relied on a technofix, and that technofix was tied, for better or worse, to politics and economics. But NOLA is not the ONLY human population center that has overshot local ecological boundaries via technofixes, and almost all of those other places have their technofixes inexorably tied to political and economic props.

Think southern California (fires, water, seismicity), think Phoenix, Vegas (water, energy--mostly for cooling), think NYC (coastal flooding, sea-level rise), all rely on expensive and politically vulnerable technofixes to sustain massive ecological overshoots. Even places outside those have vulnerabilities, chiefly in terms of reliance on the technofix of a centralized massive utility grid. What happened in NOLA after Katrina can happen and will happen in other places.

Human experience over nearly 80-100K years shows us that a group is only as strong as it's weakest member. But the owning class doesn't give a shit about it because they've increased the weakness of most of the members of each local community team.

Think of your own place, where do you get water, heat, power from? What technofixes enable you to live there? How are those technofixes propped? Are those props vulnerable? How?

If the owning class doesn't learn the lesson or heed the warning of NOLA-Katrina, everyone downwind of them is fucked. If the owning class doesn't wise up and learn to share power and resources with those lower down, if they insist on keeping things as they are, or even merely "reforming" them with little placations and marginal compromises in power and resource sharing, the rest of us are in for a HUGE world of hurt. At that point the owning class has only itself to blame. They are in control, they have all the money, they constantly choose to reserve both for themselves at others' expense. Nature is Nature. What happens in one place will happen in another. The laws of ecology do not change just because the owning class wants this or that instead, no matter from what their beautiful minds wish to remain free.

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I wanted to give an example of southern California, where I live, that supports the lesson and warning of NOLA-Katrina.

Here in socal the lesson that could be taken from New Orleans post-Katrina is mostly ignored, inexcusably so because the owning class either doesn't give a shit or can't be bothered to change the system they've created, a system they reserve exclusive control over (economics, politics, infrastructure).

We have technofixes and ecological knowledge that can allow us to live in a chapparral environment. However, we don't employ either of them. Instead, we use overly expensive and political technofixes (fire suppression methods and policies) and all but a very small minority of the uber-elite employ ecological knowledge or structural technofixes, even though the vast majority of the owning-class can certainly afford at least those. And they maintain a chokehold on the rest of us who would choose to site and build differently to fit within the ecological boundaries of our places if only we could or were allowed to pay for it.

Largely the ecological wisdom of our place is spat-upon by existing fire suppression policies, which are predicated upon outdated knowledge re: how a chaparral ecosystem works in relation to fire. The CA Native Plant Society updated their own research in the May or June issue of Fremontia but that shocking research is ignored by policy makers of the owning-class. The most frequent excuse used to ignore it is, "this is just too new" to be relied upon. Um, say what?! How about you're just too damned lazy to read a twenty page summary paper on the science, buttmunch!

We've done better on seismicity, but even those technofixes are horribly reliant on external financial props. And those economic props are welded to political whim of the owning class. We have better tech and infrastructure but that is propped by economics and politics. Um, Katrina lesson reminder: If your overshoot technofix is propped in a vulnerable way, it will fail.

Water is where we're facing a massive disaster. It takes energy to move water from a place that has it to a place that doesn't, all to support people who overshot the natural hydrological boundaries of that place to begin with. it takes infrastructure to move that water, to process it and to deliver it as well. That technofix is propped by economics and welded to politics. It is extraordinarily vulnerable as a result.
If a disaster hits that water overshoot technofix or it's props fail, there will be a mass migration and eviction of humanity that will make NOLA's ordeal look easy. Seismicity and fire is a singular event, it hits and goes away. Water is not. Water is life itself.

Take this very cursory look at my place's problems as an example, go through the list of the shitstorm experienced by NOLA that this article details, then apply it to where you live. It's important. Alternet should be applauded for publishing this piece. It's a substantive warning to the rest of the nation.

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...Obama wins in November, he could give the USA a two-fer--end the immoral, lie-started war in Iraq--and, as the National Guard return permanently from that land, President Obama could send them to rebuild Louisiana.

Oh, and just to make it a triple--Obama could NOW, pay a surprise visit to the current White House. Looking for bin Laden--because that's whose money rescued Dubya's first failed business venture, Arbusto Oil. Yeah. Osama and the Bushes have always been great family friends--even if neither quite got everything that they wanted, from 9/11.

Remember Bush? "Bin Laden...not important." I don't think there's any American who's ever forgiven Bush, for that alone.

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Half the missing people have discovered that welfare payments are better in Texas, California, Washington . . . most any other state. They will never return to New Orleans.

Second, zero chance they would be permitted to rebuild their blue collar houses on prime real estate. New Orleans will be the next Phoenix.

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